Big Boxes on the Plains
By Denis Boyles

Middle America doesn't get more middle than the long necklace of small towns strung along the Republican River, which rises in eastern Colorado and ends in Kansas. There are no sprawling metropolises here: Two of the largest towns--McCook, Nebraska and Concordia, Kansas--have populations of 7,700 and 5,400, respectively. I should say they "had" that population, since this is the agricultural heartland, where emigrants to bigger cities are one of the most reliable crops. In both towns, 25-50 people pack up each year and leave, continuing a population decline that started not long after they were founded (Concordia in 1866, McCook 16 years later). The cycles of agrarian boom and bust that have swept the Great Plains over the last century have eaten away at these small towns virtually since they were built.

In Concordia's main shopping district, the tough job of growing new opportunities belongs to an ex-farmer named Kirk Lowell, a fifth-generation Concordian and the director of Cloud Corp, the local economic development bureau. "At one point in the mid '80s," Lowell recalls, "we had 17 or 18 empty storefronts. I called it 'Tumbleweed Alley' because there was nothing there.... I used to say you could commit suicide by laying down in the middle of the street on a Saturday, but you probably wouldn't die until Monday. There were just no cars."

In McCook it was the same story: "The main street was having a hard time," says Muschi Mues, a German-born artist who arrived in the area in 1972. "When I came we had a men's clothing store, two women's clothing stores, shoe stores, all kinds of stores. But then we hit a really low spot. Main Street changed. Stores were closing and it was just sort of dead."

Mark Graff, chairman of McCook National Bank, wouldn't go quite that far. "We never quite died," he told me. "But it was bad." Even the Keystone Hotel, a 1920's project of a local "Can-Do Club" to stimulate downtown business, gave up welcoming newcomers and instead became an old-folks home, before finally closing completely.

Then, as both towns bottomed out, they got what almost everyone assumed would be the final nail in the coffin of local commerce. They got Wal-Mart. The result wasn't what anyone expected.

The creature from Bentonville

The national campaign against Wal-Mart now being led by frustrated unions caricatures the company as a life-sucking creature from Bentonville. Wander into a Wal-Mart Supercenter in the middle of an empty prairie, and you'll see why. It's like staring into the vast Midwestern night sky: you realize you're looking at something much bigger than you can understand, something far more complex than some left-wing bogeyman. In just these two rural states, Kansas and Nebraska, Wal-Mart employs more than 30,000 people. It pays most of them nine or ten bucks an hour, along with a benefit package that can raise hourly pay by as much as five dollars, plus performance incentives and employee profit-sharing. According to Wal-Mart figures, the company collects $307 million in sales taxes and remits $39 million in other Kansas and Nebraska levies. The company pays $2.8 billion to 1,650 local suppliers, and by doing so creates another 71,000 jobs (and even more tax revenue).

As rural communities in Kansas and Nebraska have shrunk, 91 Wal-Marts have moved into the void left by departing merchants. Many of these are giant Supercenters. Anyone who has lived in Europe knows that even places like Belgium and France now rely on sprawling megamarkets, which have become a fact of modern life everywhere.

When Wal-Mart's Supercenters open, however, there are always some angry people who vow never to set foot in the place. Graff, who speaks with the careful locution of a small-town banker, says that when the McCook Supercenter was announced in 1995, "some people were very concerned."

We call many of those people "grocers" and "grocery union members"--because the hallmark of a Supercenter is a big warehouse filled with cheap eats run by worker-stockholders who steadfastly refuse to vote in unions. According to the Wall Street Journal, Wal-Mart cuts the price of groceries as much as 27 percent. Across the country, that has lowered retail prices for everyone. It also puts pressure on unionized workers and less efficient stores.

Locally, it drove four supermarkets out of business in McCook, and left Concordia with only one--Rod's, where the owner, Rod Imhoff, greeted the opening of the Supercenter with a $1.2 million expansion of his own. It was a gutsy move. While his supermarket has remained in business by doing what the local Wal-Mart can't--helping people to cars with groceries, delivering orders, operating a full-line bakery and a delectable deli counter--Imhoff reports that it's not easy.

In McCook, the Schmick family--Bob and Debbie and their sons--opened a new grocery last December providing the kind of service that Supercenter manager Tom Lambing admits "we just can't offer." What are the chances of succeeding against Wal-Mart? Bob Schmick, who once worked for Wal-Mart, was afraid to venture a guess. "What you say can come back to hurt you," he tells me in refusing an interview. When I approach another man who successfully ran a Ben Franklin store on a side street in McCook for 25 years, and ask him about the secrets of competing with Wal-Mart, he simply answers, "I don't want to visit on that topic" and returns to his work, which happens to be counting money.

Romance and reality

The fear and loathing stirred up by Wal-Mart is nothing new. McCook and Concordia, and many similar towns across America, previously saw huge national retailers like Sears, J. C. Penney, and Montgomery Ward move in. Mom and Pop stores figured out how to compete around them, rather than against them, or else went bust.

Just the same, Wal-Mart is more than just another new chain store in town. It's retail at an evolved state, with a DNA manipulated by four decades of mutation and struggle and more mutation. If capitalism's a jungle, Wal-Mart is the king of it. And if you're a Main Street merchant going head-to-head with the beast, you're a three-legged antelope.

The havoc we think we see Wal-Mart wreaking on our Norman Rockwell-perfect vision of small town America sometimes makes our blood boil. Gone is the friendly general store, the cheerful grocer, the haberdasher, the dressmaker. The fact that nearly all of these emblems of Midwestern Smallvilles vanished before Wal-Mart even showed up almost doesn't matter.

It's satisfying to imagine that if only there weren't a Wal-Mart on the horizon, maybe that cozy downtown would still be bustling. In wealthy places like Marin County or Martha's Vineyard, people are happy to pay extra for the pleasure of buying bread and milk in boutique stores, so bits of the postcard paradise remain. Never mind that these old-fashioned businesses were built for people living in a much smaller world, and aimed at consumers with far narrower tastes, by capitalists embracing a traditional value system that most of the boutique shoppers now despise.

But the median household income in Concordia is around $31,400 (versus $71,300 in Marin County). There are no Wal-Marts in Marin County because the people who live there don't need one. So they can hate Wal-Mart for sport. They cannot only hate the idea of them in their own towns, but they can also hate them being in Kansas and Nebraska, too. In the real world of hardscrabble farming towns like these, however, things are a little different.

The arguments against Wal-Mart invariably rest on romantic premises. The most central argument against Wal-Mart is that people who need Wal-Mart should pay more for stuff so the people who don't need a Wal-Mart can feel better about themselves and their towns. This has been enough to block stores in certain places. That's why there are only one quarter as many Wal-Marts in California, on a per capita basis, as in Kansas and Nebraska.

Recently, the city of Inglewood, a deeply impoverished section of the L.A. basin, decided against allowing the construction of a Wal-Mart Supercenter. Wal-bangers heralded this as a victory, of course. The result is several hundred fewer jobs where jobs are needed, higher prices for basic commodities for lots of poor people, and less tax revenue for a needy city that regularly has to scramble to provide basic services. And to preserve what, exactly? Take a drive through Inglewood sometime and note the quaint and charming business district. Just go straight as you leave the airport, and left at the third strip club.

People actually sell books today telling others how to "defeat" Wal-Mart. And the conventional media narrative takes it for granted that those who work for Wal-Mart are exploited. A huge left-wing campaign propagates the myth of the Wal-Mart serf mainly because the company is non-unionized. In this it is hardly alone: less than 8 percent of private-sector workers now join unions.

The hard fact in the real world--including McCook and Concordia--is that most small retailers pay their employees far less than what a Wal-Mart employee makes. And small shops don't usually pony up for health insurance and 401(k)s and vacations, either. Graff tried to calculate for me how many people were employed by locally owned main-street businesses in McCook, and couldn't break 200. The Wal-Mart employs 300 and some, and pays them enough to shop on Main Street. The same is true in Concordia, where a nice three-bedroom house costs less than $60,000. (I couldn't find anything in San Rafael, the seat of Marin County, under a half-million.)

Lying down with the lion

I asked Genna Hurd, the co-director of the Center for Community Economic Development at the University of Kansas, what characterizes a successful small town. She told me it was "local leadership and vision." The opening of the Supercenters--McCook's in July 1995, Concordia's exactly six years later--shows how the two communities, which are often similar, have risen in different ways to the Hurd standard.

When residents of McCook want to go to the big city to shop and play, they must drive either four hours across the state to Omaha, or five hours into the hills to Denver. Yet there is a surprising amount of life right in this small town. I chatted with Mues in the art gallery she and some other locals run on Norris Avenue, the architecturally rich shopping street paved with red bricks. Down the street was Sehnert's Bakery, and next to that the Bieroc Cafe, where touring folk acts perform regularly. Banks, gift shops, a shoe store or two, a gourmet kitchen store, some jewelry and antique shops, a museum, and a few restaurants filled the storefronts. Most of this revitalization has taken place since the Wal-Mart Supercenter replaced its smaller store six years ago.

Graff reports that area banks work together to supply leadership and support for local businesses in imaginative ways. At one point, for example, they combined resources to restore an old building in order to keep a business in town. Other local money followed their example. Most of the buildings on Norris Avenue are owned by people who live in the community and have a direct interest in its commercial health. The daily newspaper is supportive of Main Street and attentive to its commercial needs. And the 400-student community college in McCook is an important source of new revenue for small area merchants.

In Concordia, which is a beautiful and charming place far more favorably situated than McCook--within striking distance of Kansas City, Wichita, and Omaha--citizens have restored an elegant Victorian opera house and do their best to support area businesses. But the central business zone has a number of important buildings sitting empty, or used for purposes that don't do much to enhance the downtown area. Brad Lowell, the local newspaper owner, told me he thinks Wal-Mart "blackmailed" Concordia by demanding expensive concessions. He also pointed out that Wal-Mart's taken away much of his grocery store advertising. The local community college has over twice as many students as the one in McCook, but you won't find many of them spending money downtown. "I never see them," says Jerry Davis, whose atmospheric Cafe Gaston seems like the kind of place that should be filled with kids drinking cappuccinos and eating pizza. "They just don't come here."

A vocal minority of locals is convinced the town is doomed. That drives boosters like city manager Larry Paine nuts. "I had one person come up to me and say, 'Larry, this town is dying. Why don't you just let it die gracefully?'" Paine then handed me a sheet listing 60 new businesses, local investments, and business expansions. "This is what we did instead."

I ask him how much of this new activity has anything to do with Wal-Mart. "Some of it. Indirectly, a lot of it," he replies. Most immediately, the tax revenues can give a big kick to these small Midwestern towns. As Roy Reif, the manager of the Concordia Supercenter, told me, "The impact really is big. Last year, the one percent of sales taxes from this store that comes to Concordia put $750,000 of revenue into the city."

Paine ticks off a long list of infrastructure projects made possible, directly or indirectly, by these funds, everything from new streets next to a newly built $4 million Holiday Inn Express, to the demolition of some derelict buildings to make way for a new, locally owned four-screen cinema. "This is because of Wal-Mart," Paine says.

While Brad Lowell thinks businesses coming to town would do better out on the highway, closer to Wal-Mart, Wal-Mart's Reif has been a booster of Concordia's old downtown, promoting the idea of late-night openings and other activities designed to help his ostensible adversaries, and circulating a shopping guide promoting local businesses. Tom Lambing, the manager of the McCook Supercenter, has done similar projects. He once brought in the Kentucky Headhunters to play a free concert that attracted 5,000 to the town.

"We pull people from 120 miles away to shop in McCook," Lambing tells me.

That doesn't surprise Concordia's Paine. "There is a large area from which people come [to Concordia]," he says. "People even come here from Salina [a city of 40,000 an hour south that has its own Supercenter], because the Salina store is too crowded."

Cloud Corp's Kirk Lowell agrees. "What you have to remember is some business people think the only thing worse than having a Wal-Mart in your town is having a Wal-Mart in another town 20 miles away."

The culture of coexistence

Belleville, Kansas, is the seat of Republic County--20 miles to the north. The ring of interesting storefronts and curious architecture that once surrounded the courthouse in the middle of the square is either gone or filled with struggling merchants. On the south side, the beautiful Blair Theatre soldiers on; a local effort to restore it is under way. On the west, a sewing shop provides the most exciting sign of commercial life. The presence of that Wal-Mart Supercenter in Concordia, 15 minutes to the south, has had a predictable effect on Belleville.

"It's hard on us," Melinda Pierson, director of the Chamber of Commerce, told me. "Having a Wal-Mart brings people to your community--and you reap the tax rewards." Belleville missed its chance for that. About 12 years ago, when Wal-Mart started thinking about upgrading its Concordia store and replacing it with a Supercenter, it considered Belleville, but decided to stay put in Concordia.

One obvious way to compete with Wal-Mart is to take a stroll through a Supercenter and make a list of all the stuff they don't sell. That seems to be what business owners on Concordia's shopping street have done. The athletic supply store Coppoc's sells Kansas State Wildcat stuff like, well, like wild. Marsha Doyenne, a concert organist and businesswoman who lived for years abroad, has come back to her hometown to run a triad of connected storefront niche businesses offering everything from fabrics and sewing lessons to health food and diet supplements.

"I sell healthy products, like formaldehyde-free shampoo--stuff that Wal-Mart doesn't sell," Doyenne reports. To explain why people need things like formaldehyde-free bath soap, Doyenne gives talks "to anybody who will have me in." She points out that "I have to educate my market," which is why I now own some patchouli bath gel with instructions for "communal use."

Gathering many retail and commercial establishments into one area like this helps attract even more new businesses. A couple of years ago, a family of Mexican entrepreneurs stopped at Wal-Mart on their way to investigate potential sites for a restaurant in Nebraska. They took a drive down Sixth Street, saw an opportunity, and opened a cantina that's so successful in drawing patrons into Concordia that other communities have convinced the owners to open restaurants in their towns.

Not all the businesses on Sixth Street are new since Wal-Mart's arrival. Nor is the big sibling on the edge of town their only worry. Art Slaughter has run the Daylight Clothing Company in Concordia for 50 years, or two complete tie-width cycles. To him, Wal-Mart is just the latest challenge.

Daylight--what Slaughter calls "a full-service men's shop"--is a rarity for any community these days. "You don't see many of us any more," he acknowledges. Competing against Wal-Mart isn't difficult for Slaughter. While some Supercenters sell $50 suit jackets in their "George" line (with $25 trousers that match), the Concordia Wal-Mart sticks with casual and work clothes. Slaughter's in a different league. "I've got 400 suits, 100 sportcoats, 75 blazers, and hundreds of shirts in stock." He's not competing against Wal-Mart. He's competing against the culture. "Casual dress, dress-down Fridays. People just don't dress up any more."

Cooperation and competition

When I told one Concordia community leader that I couldn't find many area merchants who were willing to tag Wal-Mart as their big problem, I was directed to Verletta Moon who, I was told, had operated a uniform store in Concordia for 15 years--until Wal-Mart did her in.

"Actually," she corrects me when we talk, "it was my suppliers. They were undercutting me," and allowing Wal-Mart to sell uniforms for less than she was paying for them. But that didn't seem to color her view of the Supercenter's role in the town. "I was chair of the retail committee of the Chamber of Commerce for five years. I'd have to say that Wal-Mart has been good for the community. It's attracted a lot of business."

In McCook, city councilman Bill Lingenfelter opened a small jewelry store in the teeth of Wal-Mart. "They don't sell what I sell," Lingenfelter explains. "In fact, they send me business"--both repairs and new customers. "They may buy their first piece of jewelry at Wal-Mart, but then they'll want something nice for the second piece."

Across the street, Mike Ford, a reformed ag-chem salesman who runs the gourmet supply store, states that Wal-Mart wasn't even an issue for his business. "I followed my passion. I always wanted to be a gourmet chef. I wasn't going to open a restaurant, so I opened this." As we speak, customers come in for wedding registry lists, and to buy packages of flavored coffees. Ford shows me a $1,000 espresso machine. "I sell these here, believe it or not," he says, pouring me a stiff one. "Wal-Mart isn't a place you go for this kind of thing. You can go to Wal-Mart and buy a $10 pan that'll last you a year. Or you can come here and buy a more expensive pan--and never have to buy another one for the rest of your life." Ford has been in business for seven years and claims to have been in the black since year one.

Despite the objections many merchants and shoppers may register toward Wal-Mart, the Arkansas giant is often not the real problem at all. "Stores that can't continue may have closed anyway," argues Carl Parker, chairman of the economics and finance department at Fort Hayes State University in Hayes, Kansas. Other merchants can compete "for years and years" with Wal-Mart, Parker finds. He points to his own experience owning an archery shop near a large Supercenter that also sold archery supplies. "I could compete with them on service and on knowledgeability, and I found I could also compete with them on price."

There's a much more serious concern looming for small town merchants than having a big competitor nearby, Parker warns. And that's the brutal competition all merchants are beginning to face from a World Wide Web of choices. Wal-Mart may prove easy to live with compared to "the Amazon.coms," the professor suggests. In America, where consumers are king, it's always been tough to succeed as a retailer. And life on Main Street is about to get harder once again.

Denis Boyles's most recent book is Vile France. He is currently writing one about Midwestern politics.